


Tattoo

by karakael



Category: GaoGaiGar
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 20:26:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6439081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karakael/pseuds/karakael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If every earthling has a mark to point to a soul-mate, what happens when that mark is taken away? And what happens if it points to an alien?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tattoo

"You have a...number?"

The other girls giggle, turning her shoulder this way and that, the pink-purple of the mark catching the light. The other girls all have their own shirts rolled up or pulled down to show the mark on their chests and wrists and stomachs. No one could ever figure out if there was meaning behind the position of your soul-mate's name. It’s just that, when you were hitting puberty, you got a name somewhere. 

"Numbah Two!" One of the girls titters, her fake american accent painful against Renais's bilingual ears. "Maybe that means you marry a robot."

"Figures you'll have to program your own lover. No one else will have you." comes a snide comment from the back.

The words sting, but Renais doesn't really care. She's a gangly tom-boy anyways, pretty voice but bandaids on her knees and bruises on her knuckles from where she punches out the boys who make fun of the smaller girls. She doesn't like her blond hair. She doesn't like her growing breasts. And she doesn't like the other girls, who all talk about boys and makeup and never about chemistry or politics or robots, except to tease her.

So she can forget the mark, cover it with loose shirts and gauze strips and go back to her life, taking it as just another sign that she's a bit different.

Then everything falls apart, and suddenly the mark makes sense. It’s the last thing on her mind, last thing she could possibly care about, but those numbers are oddly comforting. _J-002_. A robot's name, as the girls long ago said. So none of these monsters with the faces of men could be the one she was destined for. No matter what they did to her, no matter what experiments they ran, the numbers stayed purple-black and they couldn't change it, even when Gimlet suggested a name-change that might win her to their side.

In the end, they took her arms. Wires and tubes ran where blood once did, her flesh plasticized to withstand the heat and stress the new body put out. They took the mark, but she didn't care anymore. _She_ was the machine, now, but as she had told herself as a child, you couldn't make a machine love. And they couldn't make her love them, no matter what they did.

Her father seemed horrified at this line of reasoning, when they finally rescued her. He cried, at her new body, at her dead eyes, and at 'the future that has been ripped from you'. 

_I don't need it_. She wanted to say, but he never listened. And when the reports came in, a year later, of a man ripped from a monster who died to save the world...well, somehow she wasn't surprised when the name tacked onto the end was "J-002", the same name that had been that bane of her existence and then a last shred of hope. 

But she didn't need hope anymore, only her two hands and the courage that sung in her veins. She didn't need the name of a man she would never meet scared into her arm, though the traitorous part of her occasionally wondered just what he must have been like, this man that the world thought was destined for her. She didn't allow herself to read the reports, didn't allow herself to question her 'cousin' about his rival. 

It was a small blessing that her father didn't know. Liger wanted his blond, blue-eyed girl-child back, the one that showed up in the pictures that Renais had posed so carefully for as a child, hair curled just so, makeup covering bruises and scrapes, inventing a child that would keep a man she had never met sending money and support to a mother who meant everything. 

He would have been just as bad as Gimlet and the rest, if he ever knew. And she couldn't bear the thought of hearing those same monstrous words out of her well-meaning father's mouth. He did try, after all, and it wasn't his fault that he wanted his sweet daughter back, rather than the warrior that had replaced her. 

' _Maybe there's others like him._ ' He might say. Or ' _Let me make an AI for you_.' He could never understand that Renais didn't need a man and no matter how she tried couldn't picture one that would fit her as she was now. Certainly any 'warrior' would expect a pretty little something that would fit him like a glove, like her cousin and his beau, Mikoto and Guy, perfectly matched in every way and the last thing Renais would ever want. She couldn't sit back and just watch, as Mikoto did, as the love of her life dashed into battle, any second liable to stretch too far and flick out like a flame.

"How can you stand it?" She asked, tightening down her armor, unwilling to let even one of her soldiers go into battle without her. "Being left behind?"

"I'm needed here." Mikoto explained, casting her eyes up at GaoFiGar. "And I'm there with him as he fights, cheering him on. Because of me, he can fuse. Because of me, he can use his tools. Because of me, He doesn't fight alone."

And then she smiled, and the love lit up her face and Renais turned away, envy knotting in her chest. That was what her father couldn't know, her deepest secret, that burn of envy. As long as she remained strong, he wouldn't pull her from the fight. But if he ever saw her waver...then it would be back to the training rooms, back to inventing wilder and wilder machines to replicate a love that had been ripped from her, and back to assuming that a moment of weakness was worth giving up everything she had fought for. 

No, it wasn't worth it, so she turned her mind away from Mikoto and Guy, Papillion and Entoki, and the mysterious man who could never have been enough.

Should never have been enough. Should have been dead and gone, a chance no longer needed, something she might one day put behind her and never dream of again.

But he wasn't dead. 

Suddenly he was right there, in her life and by her side, at a time when there was not a moment to spare for emotion. She hadn't let herself hope, even when the boy who had old eyes had spoken to her of the man who had once again sacrificed himself for another. She had gotten into the habit of only hoping for concrete things, and long-gone numbers weren't going to change her habits.

She didn't let herself think when she found him, in the last place she would have ever expected. And then when he dismissed her as just another cyborg it was easy to treat him as another idiot who wasn't worth the proof of her competence.

But her heart pounded when they fought, side by side, trading partners and watching each other's back as if they had known each other for years. He flew, long reach, flashing blades. She dodged, spinning kicks and setting traps. Equal. Balanced. 

He didn't need to know about her old destiny when he took her hand. She didn't need to know about his past when she caught him when he fell. A universe needed saving and that was all that mattered. But somehow they found themselves together, right to the very end, and it was without hesitation or thought of fate that she took his hand and gave away all her power for one last, impossible chance.

And then it was over, and she lied with a straight face and sent the closest thing he had to family away and felt a yawning loneliness steal his heart. The lie was easy, freedom and kindness of giving the child a future that would not involve banishment from the one home he knew, but still J crumbled behind the carefully constructed facade of perfect warrior. 

In the end, it was more for his sake that she remained by his side, letting him draw in the warmth of her body while she tried to hide her sympathy and frustration at being incapable of doing more. Understanding the feelings of others was not her strength, but for the first time she chafed at the fact. Mikoto or Pappillion - they would have known what to do, they could have spoken to him through the loneliness. But it was Renais’s silence he turned to, growling at techs and medics who got too close, only submitting to their attentions when she admitted to needing her own repairs. Then he was angry for her, as Tomorro listed off the conflicting components of her design. She felt his anger, boiling at the back of her mind, and even though it was partially an escape from the despair of Arma's loss, she still felt touched.

He sat next to her, still holding her hand as if their lives depended on it (which perhaps they did), all throughout her maintenance. To the outside world, they said nothing, but through their shared link they exchanged histories, all the while Tomorro excitedly redesigned Renais's cybernetics 'to be the best warrior we can make you!'

She grinned at that, knowing her father would never understand why she would trust Tomorro to do what she would never accept from anyone else. J and Tomorro didn't see her as a broken machine with the face of a daughter, they saw another warrior, an ally whose 'damage' could be combined with Red Planet tech to create a fearsome fighter. Tomorro delighted in the idea, never considering that Renais might be terrified of going back under the knife, and gleefully showed her every possible modification, unapologetic and completely transparent with his intentions. After three years of hushed tones and _'but you could be normal'_ Renais couldn't help but be won over. And all along J was there, at the back of her mind, curiously tasting the flicker of her emotions and asking _why_? Why did Liger not modify her more? Why would they not allow her to fight? Why had Bio-Net courted war, and why had they chosen her for their victim? 

She tried to explain as best she could, and in the process answered half a hundred other questions about life on Earth and human customs. By in large, the Soldato was completely lost when it came to humanity, his perfect stoic poker face hiding his confusion on matters from relationships to religion. 

It took her longer than perhaps it should to realize that it wasn't Earth that was alien to him, but being part of a living world. He had been made for war, one of thousands of identical warriors, and went from test-tube to warrior to defeat in a few horrific years. He had never known the Red Planet at its height, never known a parent or a mentor.

Abel had designed her soldiers well, with perfect bodies and minds programmed with all the data they could ever need for war, but she had never considered that experience and emotion were important as well. So Soldato after Soldato fell, unable to fully utilize their powers, all for want of a bit of wisdom.

Perhaps Zoderization was the best thing that could have happened to him. But Renais refused to believe that.

Instead she took on his education as fair trade for Tommoro's upgrades. Together the three of them pieced together something new. 

“Humans all have...marks?” He finally asked one day, close to the end of their time in medical, prompted by Tommorro asking if she wanted a replacement tattoo on her new cybernetic arm. (The poor robot was confused when she laughed at his suggestion that she should use a 002 to commemorate her upgraded body.)

“Not all humans, no. But most do.They’re supposed to be the name of your soul mate.”

At his look she tried to explain in a manner he would understand.

“It’s like...magnets.” In the back of her mind she heard Tommorro snort at the analogy but she pressed on in the metaphor. “One half always pulls towards the other. Humans are like that with their soul mates. Even if they never meet, they’re always pulling towards their other half.”

Instinctively she touched her shoulder, where her own mark had once been. Strange, how she had thought so little of it in the last three months, despite the man finally being before her. Yet she also understood why the mark had pointed her in J’s direction. No other person she had ever met had allowed her the freedom that this strange man had.

“Hmm.” Was his response. 

He looked about to say more, when around them then the lights flickered, and Tommorro flashed green with a realization.

“J, it’s just like frequencies. They’re using _harmonics_ to find these ‘soul mates’!”

The bird man raised a brow. “How...primitive.”

“Harmonics?” Renais glanced from her partner to the wall where Tommorro sat.

As always, the AI was happy to explain. “Its this old belief. _Not_ scientific at all. It says that everyone has frequencies that make them unique, even clones. Supposedly the Stones and Jewels tap into that, but that’s the only proof of it they had. Commander Abel thought it was silly, just an explanation for why certain people work best with each other. But Cain made all the Soldato’s measure their frequency, to keep them separate.”

“To give us something unique to ourselves.” J murmured, eyes hooded, arms crossed, one finger tapping against his arm.

“Yeah. Shows up with an injection just under the skin that probably would look like a tattoo to you humans.” Then, in one of those shifts that was so typical of the juvenile AI, Tommorro focused on Renais again.

“Hey! Is that why you have J’s numbers on your arm?”

“What?!” Renais glanced down, seeing nothing but the familiar scarred flesh and clasps of her prosthetic where the mark used to be.

“No, no, on the _other_ arm.”

Still confused, she look into the mirror the AI provided. All she saw were more clasps and connectors, more obvious due to the necessities of her GS-Ride system, but still intimately familiar and yet completely unreadable.

“You didn’t know?” J asked, bemusement in his voice.

Then he took her arm, lightly, and twisted it to catch the light.

“See here? These connectors make the sign for ‘naught’. Two of them, followed by a “2”, written in the old language of the Red Planet.” He paused, considering. “Of course, no one from the Blue Planet would have read it so.”

“Huh.” Tommorro said. “Just like your mark was unreadable, J.” 

“What do you mean?” Renais asked, trying not to flush under the touch of her partner.

He released her arm and leaned back.

“Some frequency marks appear to name others, presumably ones that the bearer will mesh well with. Others hold phrases, words that could affect the person’s life, if the priests are to be believed.”

“But J’s isn’t in any language anyone could read. ‘Till we got to earth and ran it through the translation software. Turns out it means “I am Reborn” in some minor language from the other side of the world. Fitting, for a guy who’s always sacrificing himself, right?” The AI teased.

But Renais was looking at her partner, lips whispering the words to herself, easily translating them into her native tongue. A tongue that would seem small and unimportant to warriors that only spoke with the Americans and Japanese.

And she couldn’t help but start to laugh.

What must have it been like, branded with a connection that made no sense, among thousands who looked and seemed the same, but whose ‘frequencies’ were simpler? Who would have ever guessed that destiny would tug him across the whole galaxy before finding an answer to the question. How easy would it have been to never know, to have remained completely oblivious to the impossible link between the two lost souls?

J looked at her strangely, and she spoke the words he knew far too well, branded as they were on his flesh, but opaque until that very moment.

“In French, ‘I am Reborn’ is _J’Renais_. That’s what’s written on your arm, isn’t it? Our names.”


End file.
